Madhu Kishwar shared a dozen tweets which summed up her takeaways from the first day of Vibrant Gujarat 2013. My personal favorites are #5, #6, and #9. 16 Even at risk of being damned for life by my secularist leftist friends, can’t help but say Gujarat Summit very impressive. Had heard… January 11, 2013 7:57 […]

What happens when you breed JustDial and ZipDial with a Nasdaq 100 software company in the Indian rural countryside? You get Intuit Fasal – a powerful agtech platform with a mission to help farmers make more money! For my non-Indian readers, I should mention that JustDial is India’s leading voice-based local search engine and ZipDial is one of the […]

All revolutions don’t have to be red in color. Milk is white and water is blue. – Old jungle saying [Editor’s Note: Meera Sanyal, CEO of RBS India who contested parliament elections in 2009 as an independent candidate in South Mumbai, went on a 15-day field trip to Gujarat in Mar 2012. She wrote a wonderful […]

“Stop MNREGA for one year and let’s kickoff Second Green Revolution with the corresponding budget of Rs. 40,000 crores!” Let me quickly disenchant you that a year of blogging and research on social enterprises has not made me an agricultural policy expert. The above statement was made by Dr. Ashok Gulati, a top agricultural economist […]

In the past week, three conversations with three different migrants in Bangalore (all working as security guards) reminded me why I need to devote more time (and blog space) to the migration meme. Conversation #1: RMM works for Handiman Services as a security guard supervisor in Koramangala. RMM is 50 years old, hails from Jajpur […]

[Possibly TechSangam’s 1st Oops moment: A friend/reader just alerted me to the fact that the WaterAid report, on which this post is based of, is from 2008 and not 2012 as I had assumed. Will hunt for more recent insights and update/link accordingly. Apologies!] WaterAid India is shortly expected to release a report on how […]

[Editor’s Note: This is the sixth in a series of excerpts from chapter 4 (education policy) of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics.] Parents are not alone in focusing their expectations on success at the graduation exam: The whole education system colludes with them. The curriculum and organization of schools often date back to […]

Israelâ€™s mandatory military service program has long been an ideal for some concerned Indian citizens (Israeli citizens need to put in a 2-3 year military stint after turning 18). They argue that a similar program for Indian citizens is the only way to inculcate patriotism and selfless service. Perhaps. After all, we are living in […]

Our good friends at PRS Legislative Services took 10-years of corruption case data (2000-2009) from National Crime Records Bureau and created a very useful visualization using Tableau. I’ll start off with some surprising observations before presenting the detailed graphical trends. The top 5 states, in descending order of total cases registered, are Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Orissa, […]